Chapter 14
The Iffrit dines out and our hero finds the night life of New York isn’t to his taste
Elgin walked towards the end of Manhattan island as evening life swirled around him. He’d seen these images a thousand times on TV, but the flickering color images had never really meant much to a country boy who’s experience with crowds was limited to the yearly rodeo. The impression had only occasionally given an inkling of the reality, the kinetics of the bodies, the constantly changing smell, the gabbling, hissing, growl of the human, architectural, machine gestalt that was the city.
He walked to the twin towers memorial park, feeling the somber power of the place. He had been a child grieving for his vanished mother when the towers had fallen and his nightmares had long combined her disappearance and the fiery punctuation of the 20th century. He walked south towards Battery Park, his senses became overloaded to the point of numbness, with the glow of the sodium lights he had to look at the intense detail of his surrounding to convince himself that he hadn’t slipped into the shadow realm.
The park was lit but had plenty of dark corners, and he walked out of one of those patches into the dim orange twilight of shadow realm night. He looked around and the park was almost unchanged, looking back he was surprised to see the city rising in orange limned silver and black. Lights flickered and drifted behind the vast vertical planes of glass, making firefly random patterns. It made sense he realized, so many souls lived here, knew it intimately, they prevented the erratic decay he was more used to.
Smiling he turned and started to run, the universe unfolded within and around him and the Iffrit was racing across the park like a cheetah, at the very last moment before reaching the esplanade he made one huge bound, unfolding his wings and he was airborne, with slow powerful flaps he accelerated out over the harbor climbing as he went. Senses scanning, the Iffrit mapped the city and part of the quantum computer that was its core matched what could be seen in the shadow realm compared to what the anchor realm map databases said.
Tired of the thin drabness of the shadow realm the Iffrit twisted back into the anchor realm after he had passed over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and started to fly roughly parallel to the shore of Long Island. His skin absorbed electromagnetic waves leaving him a black hole in the night sky. He let his muscles do the work, soaring on a few sluggish thermals and beating his wings only as he needed to. By the time he was level with the end of Long Island, he began a long glide exercising the natural senses of a predator attuned to prey. He honed in on an area quite quickly, there were ships, boats, one brightly lit, the others dark, fishing. They were taking in fish and there were some reasonable sized sharks as well as some warm blooded sea hunters.
It had been an age since he had hunted the sea and Elgin - Iffrit couldn’t help himself, with a siren scream of joy he rolled over and furled his wings and fell straight down. Air rushed past as the dive accelerated, halfway down his wings opened a little as he started to line up on the shark that was foolishly drifting towards the surface.
-o-
Calvin Dorsey was out in the Atlantic on a cold fall night because he liked being at sea and loved being paid. The pair of scientists had chartered the Sea Rider for three nights of trolling with their electronic gear during what was normally a dead season. Their gear was pretty conventional, four yellow metal and plastic fish that formed some kind of hydrophone array set to listen for aquatic mammal sounds, whale song. They had been doing this every three weeks for the past year, trying to create some kind of ‘profile’ of marine mammal activity. Why what they were doing was different from a hundred other projects Dorsey had heard over the years was beyond him, and the pair spent a lot of their time together in the cabin or cuddled up together on the fantail, laughing and giggling, but their checks went through so he didn’t care.
He checked the radar, shipping to the south, over the horizon, he could make out the rain that was falling on New York proper, but it was moving more north than east and they should stay dry. The sky above him had some clouds but also a silvery full moon and all the stars one would ever want to try and count.
Then he caught a flicker of movement in the sky, for a moment silhouetted against the silver white of a cloud he saw a winged shape, birdlike and yet subtly not. Then it was gone, and he frowned confused, the shape had seemed to be a long way away and very high, but the silhouette had been big. And he didn’t know of birds that flew at night over the Atlantic, particularly going north in the fall. Calvin grabbed his pair of night vision goggles. The world was shades of green, including the sky, the moon was impossibly bright. He scanned the sky, nothing. Had he been dreaming?
From above, and roughly in the direction of the apparition, he heard a sound he could only think of a a mix between a roar and basso coyote howl. He twisted and there was a shadow, black against the sparkling green of the sky. It grew terrifyingly quickly, then wings extended and it passed with ripping hiss. The sea split as the fast moving flyer hit the sea and then it was beating the air hard and something wet, fishy and huge hung from the creature’s clawed feet, then quite clearly he saw it reach down and pull the shark around to face the direction of flight, reaching back with fore legs.
Then fisher and catch were accelerating away from him and it faded into the green sparkles of the background. He put the night vision goggles down with shaking hands, he’d seen that maneuver before, an osprey or other fishing eagle ‘hitting’ a surface basking fish. He’d never imagined he’d see something that could pull a ten foot or better shark out of the sea and fly away with it.
“Hey Mr. Dorsey what the hell was that all about?” It was the girl scientist, Trisha, Dr. Trisha something, her cuddle bunny another PhD, Dr.Denny something or other, was on the steps his head pushed up under her arm.
Calvin shook his head, “Damned if I know, did you see anything?”
Trish shook her head, “We heard something like a sealion roar or the like, then you were yelling, and something flew past really low, at least that’s what it sounded like, then something hit the sea, there was some other noises then nothing. Whatever it was that hit the sea was close enough that we got some spray. Was it some kind of plane? Do we need to go back and look for survivors?”
Still numb and dumb Calvin stared at the pair, and shook his head, and finally got out, “Wasn’t a plane.”
Denny pointed at Calvin’s hand resting on his goggles, “You had your goggles on, you see anything? The camera catch anything?”
Calvin grabbed it up with a jerk, “Blast it, I’d forgotten about that, let’s see.”
He checked the radar and autopilot and then dodged down into the cabin, the pair of scientists met him. He plugged the camera, mounted so it ‘looked’ down the right eye piece, into the display screen.
The big flat-screen lit up green, jiggling and rolling, blooming and sparkling as the tube caught the moon, a bright star or a distant ship light. Then it firmed up on a blot of pure black that grew quickly. He slowed the frame rate, the shape was just that at first, a blackness against the dark green, a hole in the night. It was just a rounded something falling more than approaching, then it sprouted stubby wings and began its approach, the blackness had no texture not interior details, but it gave the impression of a great bird of prey. Then it snapped past and for an instant it was in profile.
“Oh Jesus God protect us, that’s no bird.” The profile of the head might have passed, the wings were birdlike, but the two sets of limbs and the tail had not the faintest resemblance to any bird. The creatures legs, all four of them unfolded just before it hit the water, the sea exploded around it and then its great wings were beating the air hard. The shape in the black monsters claws was silvery green, its tail and form identifying it as a shark, and one of the bigger ones.
“That was a dragon, a fishing dragon?” Denny whispered.
Trish ran the video back, “Look at the head? I think it’s got a beak, and the body, just as it
was about to strike it looked like a cat, I think it’s a Gryphon.”
Denny, who was the real geek of the pair was looking troubled, “There’s something damn strange about it though, don’t you see it’s black, all black?”
“Yeah, a black Gryphon, so?” Trish sounded possessive.
The boy scientist shook his shaggy head, “No, the amplifiers don’t see color, just photons, the more photons hit the detector the brighter the image. Look at the sky, even the sky glows green, a few photons reflected by the air. But your Gryphon is black, it’s a silhouette of what’s not there, there’s not the faintest trace of reflected light. We can see it because it’s silhouetted against the noise in the background. It’s as if we’re looking at a hole in the universe.”
-o-
Elgin stood in the shadows of the riverside park and tried to settle his stomach. The Iffrit had eaten two sharks, apparently enjoying them but Elgin hadn’t gotten used to eating his meat raw, he’d blanked out the first few times the Iffrit had fed but not recently. He’d enjoyed the steak with Zeph because it was good, it was great to spend time with her, and because he hadn’t eaten beef in six weeks, since the last time the Iffrit’s hunger drove him into the mountains to hunt elk.
He’d landed further north on the island, near Chinatown, his hotel was on the far edge of Chinatown. A nice mid-priced establishment, that charged more per night than Elgin made in week.
Standing there he ‘felt’ the distortion in the realms that indicated that a significant talisman was nearby and active, it had an ancient, familiar ‘feel’ to the Iffrit. Elgin started to walk, a winding path towards the source. The eerie familiarity was joined by others, the spices and nastier odors weren’t that different from what Cutter-Iffrit had smelt when he traveled China in past millennia.
Even now, well after midnight there was a bustle, some of the shops and restaurants were still open serving the warehouses and work houses that still hung on here. He walked down one street and suddenly found himself in a very different area, decrepit and no longer trying to put a faintly oriental gloss on raw brick and concrete. The talisman focus was nearby, below ground and ‘it’ was unhappy, inasmuch as a piece of man shaped matter imbued with emanations of many thousands of human souls could be said to ‘be’ anything.
Elgin could feel both electronic and human watchers as he walked down the street towards the next cross road. From that direction he could hear music, and see a faint wash of flickering colors. The five story building had a covered walk in front, and in front of that an oddly old fashioned, out of place, chevroned row of parking slots, most of them filled. Down the street in a bulldozed building lot, two big rigs sat idling and some more cars, smaller, much older ones, were huddled across the street in the shadow of another abandoned building.
The brick front rose up, the shadows made complex by the long gone bricklayers artistry. The windows were mostly dark except for a glint here and a crack there. But they all glowed in the frequencies of heat and blurs moved in inscrutable ways behind the glass and thick curtains. The bottom level had two entrances, one boarded up, the other glowing with garish flashing lights that said Bar, Saloon, Speak Easy, Pub and the equivalent in a rainbow of scripts and ideograms. There was also the neon tube outline of a naked woman shaking what she had.
After studying the front Elgin turned to continue his walk, he knew what the place was and the probable source of the talisman’s discontent but there was nothing he could do right now. As he was about to turn the next corner he twisted slightly to look at the building out of the corner of his eye. It stood tall, alone, dark, brooding, nothing to attract one’s attention, in fact it was actively shunning his attention. When he turned the corner he found that his human mind could no longer remember what he had seen, but had no desire to figure out what it was he had forgotten. It felt odd to ‘see’ that he had forgotten something, to sense the manipulation.
The talisman’s magic was being used, someone with the ability to manipulate magic was involved. The place had a sense of permanence, the surrounding streets a sense of outward pressure that said the bordello had been there for a long time. It was almost a rift realm without the spacial distortion.
“Didn’t anybody tell you it’s not safe to walk the streets at night cowboy?” the relatively well dressed thug who stepped out of the doorway to block the sidewalk asked in rather poor Mandarin.
“I was a little lost, just trying to return to my hotel.” Elgin replied in the same language. He wasn’t surprised that he knew the language, it came with what he was now.
There was another man standing a little behind the first one and there were two behind him. They were all armed with guns, knives and weapons for simple beatings, including steel toed boots. Elgin’s fist balled and relaxed, the air around him began to imperceptibly thicken space distorted and swirling swarms of nanos formed up.
“You looking for something? It certainly looked like you were looking for something.” The thug continued to stroll forward.
“Should I have been? As I said I’m on my way to my hotel.” He pointed, “A couple of blocks that way and then a bit north.”
“What brings you to New York, cowboy.” The question was pointed, hostile even in Mandarin.
“Family business,” Elgin replied quietly.
“Long way from home for family business.”
Elgin shrugged, “This is where the lawyers are.”
The well dressed thug smiled, “Isn’t that the truth.” He started to walk casually forward, waving the man behind him forward, “You speak Mandarin very well for a round eye.”
“Thank you, a business necessity these days,” Elgin smiled just as falsely.
The thug patted Elgin on the back as he passed, “Take care of yourself cowboy, don’t come back, this can be a dangerous neighborhood.”
The nanites told Elgin that the other man’s pat had attached a tracking bug to his jacket. Elgin let it stay and continued his walk. A few streets over the pseudo oriental gloss returned along with a little more bustle and life. He picked up a shish kabob of dumplings and stood eating them slowly. There was something about the bug.